


He Had Been Human, Once

by Kafoomph



Category: Hat Films - Fandom, The Yogscast
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Non graphic depiction of violence, mild swearing, possible origin story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-29
Updated: 2015-03-29
Packaged: 2018-03-20 03:47:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3635427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kafoomph/pseuds/Kafoomph
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just a possible origin story for Alsmiffy</p>
            </blockquote>





	He Had Been Human, Once

**Author's Note:**

> This story idea kind of burrowed its way into my head after Smith's turn on the lucky blocks video, so I had to write it down. It's a little rushed so please let me know if you see any mistakes.  
> Hope you enjoy.

He had been human, once.

He was so sure of it. The dreams of heavy iron armour slightly chafing over his once pinked skin, the echo of the scrape of the hilt of his sword against his once solid flesh felt too real to be just a dream. He remembered hazily toiling in a field during the day and hunting undead and skeletal abominations after dark. He remembered.  
It wasn't just a fanciful exercise of his imagination. It couldn't be.

Because sometimes the memories came too vividly to be anything other than a remembrance. The swing of his blade through the chest of a creeper felt like the echo of a long lost muscle memory- a strange sensation considering he didn't quite have muscles any more. At least, not muscles like you'd find in an ordinary human.

The subtle scent of vis from his thaumic experiments brought memories of a cake being rested on a windowsill for some reason. And, although the woman in this mental film was always out of focus and her words came muffled, one thing stood out crystal clear. Above the delicious smell of the cake and the heat from the sunlight that warmed his skin, as clear as a scream in the silence was a name. A name that he could never remember when he woke.

It pushed him further into the study of thaumcraft, trying to glean insight further and further into this memory until the name would be as clear as day to him. Thankfully he found he quite enjoyed thaumcraft so his quest turn out to be not too laborious.

At least, it stopped being laborious when he stopped getting all that bee crap to research.

He thought he find his answers in the thaum and the vis. It was the closest he'd felt to being human in quite a while, at least since he'd met and started adventuring with the walrus and his friend. Since meeting them he'd been able to relax, not getting too caught up on why he was what he was, or to get too worried about the blackouts.

But then they met that girl. Her skin pulsing slowly, stained purple with flux, caused a burning sensation to mirror itself on his body. His left eye felt like it was being impaled whenever he caught her flux blinded eye.

He hated her. Because now he remembered.

He remembered with startling clarity his cosy, tiny cottage that he shared with his mother and sister. He'd followed his father and brother into the danger ridden trade of sulphur collection and he'd been the only one to survive. They'd lived in the outskirts of town, their fields just bordering the road out of town and the local mage's workshop. The mage that still asked him to collect sulphur for experiments instead of the production of explosives, which he agreed to collect despite his mothers concerns. He remembered the mage's words of reassurance to his mother well. “Do not worry. Your son is a gifted survivor.”

He donned his armour often and collected items for the mage for small amounts of gold or iron. He often suspected the mage helped their crops when he couldn't pay him for his services. They were a small town, and it wasn't like anyone was particularly wealthy after all.

He got into enough scrapes that he didn't notice the purple staining his skin at first. The 'bruise' that rested over his kidney was waved off as just another bump he'd gotten on his travels. It was only when his sister complained that her tongue felt like it was going numb, and her throat checked in case she was sick with tonsillitis again only to reveal a sopping purple mess that filled her mouth, did he look more carefully at the bruise again. His mother panicked. Whatever this was it wasn't natural, so she did what any logical person would do when faced with something that she couldn't explain, she tried to find someone that could.

It was pitch black, he remembered, as his mother dragged his sister to the mage's workshop. He remembered the door being angrily thrown open and the man who'd so amiably asked for his assistance ready himself to throw them out. He remembered the look on the mage's face morph from anger to disbelief to an emotion that he didn't have a word for and never wanted to see again. The closest thing he to place it to was greed. It turned to delight as his mother explained that she was affected too. When those greedy, piggy little eyes turned themselves his way he lied out of sheer panic. Told them all that he was fine, and that regardless of the possibility that whatever his remaining family had might be catching, he wouldn't leave them.

The mage nodded and led them inside to be examined, poked and prodded until sleep got the better of all of them and beds were found to rest in. The stained skin pulsed and burned, eating at him from underneath his nightshirt, feeling like he was burning from the inside out. He spent that night holding on to his family, hoping that the mage was actually looking for a cure. After three days of experimentations with little progress his sister died, he had watched as his mother grew too sick to be moved and his own taint, as he'd heard the mage describe it, grew harder and harder to hide. The day his mother died he fell asleep holding her prone form whilst trying not to cry.

He woke, his outerwear removed, laid out on a table, too weak to move. He'd been discovered. The mage hovered eagerly over him, muttering to himself. “I tried. I tried everything I could think of. Inhaling it, injecting it, bathing in it. Can you feel it? You must feel it thick in the air. Anyway... Ah yes. I'd mixed it with stones and metals, water and my meals, and none of it seemed to work. It just never seemed to, stick, to me.

But you. And your mother and sister. You all showed signs of being fluxed. At first I couldn't fathom why but then I remembered. The bone meal.”

“You poisoned us?”, he managed to gasp out, his voice weakened like his body. He went ignored.

“I hadn't even considered that flux would affect a growing crop but it makes sense. An oversight, though I've since corrected this.”, the mage said grinning widely. “I know it hurts, that you feel weak and that you're only going to get weaker. But we're being made stronger friend, we're being made better.”

“Fuck you.”

The mage stepped back, offended. His excited demeanour soured quickly and he muttered darkly to himself, “You'll see you ingrate. Mother'll show you.” With a final, dark look in the direction of Smith, the mage slammed the door to the room on his exit, leaving Smith in the dark with nothing but the creeping pain of flux for company.

He was nothing if not stubborn, fighting the magical parasite for every inch of flesh it took. The first day of his solitary confinement he could hear the mage moving around the house, on the second this was replace with rapturous yelling and praising of 'Mother', until it died away to silence on the dawn of the third. He refused to cry out, to make note of show of his pain, but in some ways the silence was worse. 

On the sixth day the flux tried to take his left eye, and the house was silent no more. 

A stream of colourful and ever increasingly violent swearing erupted from him as the pain prickled over the sclera to the iris and over the lens of his eye, like a thousand jagging little pricks that were stabbing at him with white hot metal. He felt like his body was on fire and it was pleasant in comparison to how his eye felt. But he gritted his teeth and tried his hardest to force the flux back. In the end neither of them won, the eye being blinded beyond use in the battle to claim it between flux and host.

For the twelve hours following the loss of his eye, Smith realised that the flux didn't seem to be trying to advance on him so he tried taking the fight to it. Hoping he could push it back and out of his system eventually. But he was heavily weakened after trying to defend his eye, and he wasn't actually prepared to meet resistance. His defences exhausted, the flux swarmed over his skin and crept purposefully toward his right eye. He flailed in defiance, only at the last moment begging the darkness, “Please don't take my eye”, before the flux advanced.

He felt it cover his closed eye, seep into the socket and gradually fill the inside of his eye. He'd expected worse pain but reasoned that his body had probably switched off to anything but the most extreme of feelings that he could experience. Pain was becoming a norm. He didn't expect to feel a soft hand caress his face.

He opened his eye and immediately wished he hadn't. The woman in front of him appeared to be dripping, pulsing with the same purple gunk that was infecting his body, except she seemed to be made out of it. She looked at him with curiosity and he felt, rather than heard, her question why he fought her so much.

His response is best left unrepeated.

He felt the strange thing's sadness at his response to what it considered a gift, it's un-worded promise that he wouldn't be in pain for much longer at first seemed like a threat. Then he remembered the mage and what he'd said to his mother the first day they'd spoken about him collecting sulphur again.

“...Your son is a gifted survivor.”

And with that small sentence the threat diminished, as the idea of death felt like the better alternative to surviving. He didn't want to be a monster. He didn't want to be blind. He didn't want to be alone. And that was all this flux could offer him. His sadness overwhelmed him- and the flux although he had no way of knowing it at the time- and physical pain gave way to something that could cut much deeper and much cleaner. It vibrated through him, forcing out the flux and finally pushing him into a deep rest.

He woke in a house that stank of rotten flesh with no memory of who he was or how he'd gotten there. His clear green skin didn't give him any cause for concern, nor did his eyes that seemed to rattle in their sockets. As far as he knew, this was how he was supposed to look, although some clothing would be nice. He raided the cupboards in the house until he found a blue suit that went rather well with his green skin. He wasn't vain, but if he could avoid clashing he would.

The house he'd woken in seemed to have been struck with some form of illness. Two people were found, the woman comfortably in a bed, but the man... The man seemed to have died in some amount of pain, face down in a small pool of blood lined vomit, with tears and scratches at his exposed skin. The green man decided it was probably best for him to leave. 

On his way out the door he picked up a flint and steel and an axe, and stopped at the mirror, remembering that he had forgotten his name. Going back to the room in which he woke, he found a hunting bag with the name, 'Alsmiffy' embroidered on the inside. Not really seeing anything better to call himself, he collected the bag as well and left via the road out of town, passing by a sad field of dead crops on his way out.

He remembered rejecting the Flux Mother, despite being considered strong enough to survive her plans. But he never considered that she'd keep looking for a disciple, at least not until he saw her.

He hated seeing the flux again, worn so openly if it was a badge of pride. Something to be grateful of. He hated knowing that it could infect his friends, his new family. He hated how he now remembered every little detail, and he hated how he wished he could just forget again. The flux was dangerous, she was dangerous. He had to do something.

It seemed simple even if it was a little evil. But she simply couldn't be allowed to survive, to be lured in by the promises of power from 'Mother', and if it was down to Smith to end this then he would. After all...

...He had been human. Once.


End file.
